The Smart Life

I love a good lifestyle blog and thought the space could use some more color. I pledge not to bore you with souped-up photos of my daily outfits or horribly executed but beautifully photographed DIY projects. However, reflections on family life, women's issues and volunteer pursuits are all fair game. Read on for juicy slices of the Smart life.

It’s hard to know where a parent’s work ends in supporting children’s academic achievement. Witness the helicopter parent next door who’s got Kumon on speed dial and watches the classroom webcam like it’s House of Cards. We sense that she’s gone too far in her vicarious quest for success, but can’t pinpoint exactly where she crossed the line between supportive parent and obsessive micromomager.

But it’s abundantly clear where a parent’s educational work starts–at birth. Long before children enter school, parents are their first teachers, consciously or unconsciously laying the pre-literacy groundwork that will undergird all future learning. Yet we tend to spend disproportionate time pondering what other people–teachers, policymakers, enrichment programs–owe our kids. Surely we’d benefit from giving ourselves the same kind of scrutiny. Do the math: we’re with our kids more than any teacher.

I celebrated Dr. Seuss’s 112th birthday by donning a red and white stovepipe hat and reading “The Cat in the Hat” to eager first graders at University of Texas Elementary School.

On my way over, I worried that the book selection was too young for them. As the mom of a four-year-old, I knew the elementary schoolers should have mastered Cat in the Hat vocabulary years ago. They’re beginning readers, I thought, but they’re veteran listeners too. A chapter book might better capture their attention.

I appreciated the opportunity to speak at Breakthrough Austin’s Beat the Odds Benefit. I shared my newcomer’s perspective on the organization and made a case for helping it close the gap between the Austin Dream and the Austin reality of extreme segregation. It’s a tough job, but I’m optimistic that the city has the resources to do it.

Here’s the speech:

My family and I moved here in May–with 3,000 other folks. We’re part of the influx of people primed to relocate by all of the Best Places lists that Austin tops. You know, the ones that say Austin is best for young professionals and retirees. That it’s tech-savvy, green, musical, safe, educated, weird. And somehow also manages to be the best place for barbecue, burgers and vegetarians.

Austin shows really well in TV specials and glossy magazines.

But when you move here and see it up close, it loses a bit of its sheen. You see firsthand that Austin has excellent homes, schools, and lifestyles–for some. But it also has incredible segregation that divides people by income, education, and class, not to mention race and ethnicity, in ways that perpetuate poverty and cripple educational attainment for far too many children.

I had the honor of participating in a lively discussion on HuffPost Live recently about an outcry over the misrepresentation of slavery in a Texas textbook.

The conversation in this case centered around a single misleading caption in a high school geography text, but the issue is much more widespread. So many wonderful points were made by host Nancy Redd and my fellow panelists Roni Dean-Burren and Mark Anthony Neal that I wanted to share the full text of our discussion in addition to the video. Scroll down for the transcript.

It’s a joy to look back at the evolution of Zora’s parties as captured on this blog. On her second birthday, just two short years ago, I declared myself a lover, not a planner, and outlined all the reasons why I didn’t “go all Martha Stewart on the occasion.” Still, I hinted that bigger things might be in store the following year. Turns out, I kept her third birthday party super simple, but went all out for a sendoff on the eve of our move to Austin. Fast-forward to Zora’s 4th birthday last month, and we’re now bonafide party animals.

We invited new schoolmates, neighbors and friends over to our place to celebrate Zora’s big day. I designed the backyard party around the ABCs–animals, books and crafts, that is–and sought the help of Austin’s finest to pull it all off. They didn’t disappoint.

Instead, I found the same old, same old: an overwhelmingly white and male list. It featured just three women authors — Harper Lee, Margaret Atwoood, L.M. Montgomery. Haruki Murakami and Alexandre Dumas the lone people of color.

Irritated, I replied: “I hope this is a first draft and you plan to do some soul searching about the bias you just put on blast.” I wrongly assumed that the whitewashed list, like so many others every year, was a sole author’s creation. Turns out, the real origin was more interesting. Time reprinted a Business Insider article summarizing a Reddit thread that asked, “What is a book that everyone needs to read at least once in their life?”

Each year authors Meg Medina and Gigi Amateau launch the Girls of Summer List of “amazing books for amazing girls,” in partnership with the Richmond Public Library. The lovingly curated selection of titles–from picture books through young adult–all feature strong girl protagonists navigating incredible tests on their journeys to womanhood.

The summer’s list launches with a party at the library, which draws girls of all ages, ethnicities and identities to talk books–no worksheets, vocab tests or reports required.

The idea emerged five years ago as Amateau and Medina prepared to send daughters off to college. “It came out of a very personal place for both of us,” Medina says. “We were sort of in mourning. You look at your daughters and you feel like you’ve run out of time. You want to tell them something else. You want to give them some other piece of information or skill so that they can go out into the world and really be strong. We just started to talk about how books helped us raise them.”

That discussion ultimately led them to pick 18 books for strong girls, one for every year of their daughters’ lives, and share them through a blog and public library event.

“It’s really something to be at a library and look out at these girls and know that what you’ve done has given them a reason to come to a library,” Medina says. “I feel like the conversation dignifies who they are and gives them practice in how you think about what you read, what you ingest, what you bring inside yourself as entertainment and as a reflection of who you are.”

As an adult and a mother, I can attest to the power of the list and its launch event to do just that. We are, to a great extent, what we read, and each year I eagerly anticipate bolstering my and my young daughter’s strength through Girls of Summer selections.

I drifted through the farewell party, feeling unmoored. Our house, no longer our home, stood empty a couple of blocks away. Our belongings were en route to a new city, our departure imminent. Yet here Zora and I stood in celebratory pause, having our last hurrah, a Happy Trails party to launch us toward our new home.

I knew I would be back in Richmond again soon. I had a house to sell and projects to lead, but I didn’t know if I would be back again with Zora, and I needed to reassure myself that I had done enough to impress the place upon her heart. It was, after all, her first home, where she was born and I became her mother.

Every now and then a crazy idea captures my imagination and won’t let go. In 2013, it was to sell 1,000 short-sleeved t-shirts in the dead of winter to raise money for a local nonprofit with deep roots but little name-recognition. In 2014, it was to transform a Richmond trolley into a Brooklyn cityscape inspired by Ezra Jack Keats’s classic children’s book “The Snowy Day.”

I thought the story’s urban landscape and celebration of childhood made it perfect for the Richmond Christmas Parade. The story about the innocence of play and the comfort of home stars Peter, a black boy. When it was published in 1962, it was considered a “pioneering portrayal.” Sadly, all these years later, it’s still noteworthy to see a black child in a storybook. In 2013, 3,200 children’s books were published, and fewer than 100 of them featured black children.

Last year I went big with my New Year’s Resolutions. I had a slew of self-improvement projects on the docket, including the infamous “This Year I Learn to Cook” intention. Guess what? I didn’t. I got busy doing more important things, and I learned to order groceries and prepared foods online instead.

This year I’m getting a late start on annual planning and I’m feeling a lot less resolute. In a complete reversal from past practice, I’ve canceled my gym membership, quit running and given up on all goals that require an excess of outside accountability to pursue. But that doesn’t mean I’m going inactive. I’m just ramping things down to a comfortable pace and shrugging off external pressure to go hard.

Hey There!

I’m Maya Payne Smart, a book lover and reviewer. I split my time between speed reading and slow writing, usually about dynamic women who lift as they climb. My specialty? Delivering life-changing reads to world-changing women.